Supply disruption is putting delivery and margin at risk.
We find the few points that could stop a shipment and treat them. The people doing it have qualified second sources and moved production in regulated plants.
Each quarter brings another shortage and another expedite. Your supplier list is long, but only a handful of those suppliers could stop you shipping, and nobody has written down which.
Signs it is already happening.
- Everyone can name the single supplier, contract manufacturer or lane that would stop a product
- Shortages keep happening although there is buffer stock everywhere
- Your landed cost moved with a tariff or a rule change after the sourcing decision was made
Why you can't switch when it breaks.
In regulated manufacturing a second source has to be validated before it can supply, and validation takes time:
- Find and audit a supplier
- Months
- Qualify the material or the process
- Often a year or more
- Change control, stability, and the regulatory change where one is required
- Adds to that
- Total, started the day the incumbent fails
- Usually longer than the cover you hold
On the day it breaks, you can draw only on sources you qualified earlier and on stock and supply terms already in place.
Why the supply design is thin.
01 · A register with no treatments
Suppliers are scored red, amber or green, and the reds carry on as before.
Fix Every exposure that can stop a shipment gets a treatment and a named owner.
02 · Stock sits in the wrong places
Safety stock is spread by rule of thumb and never checked against the points that could stop a product.
Fix Put stock and second sources at the few points that matter, within shelf life and under your quality agreement, and hold less elsewhere.
03 · Nobody costed the alternative
A second site, a second manufacturer or a reshored line would each need its own qualification, and none of them has a landed cost against it.
Fix A landed cost for each option, qualification included, for leadership to decide on.
How we move on it.
First month
The short list
Which materials, suppliers, sites and lanes can stop a product, and what each would cost you in weeks and in margin.
By day 90
The top exposures treated
By then buffers sit where a break would land, supply agreements carry allocation and notice terms, leadership has signed a continuity sequence, and second-source qualification is under way with a date. Qualification takes the time it takes, so we start it in the first month.
Then
Make and buy where it now pays
Leadership takes footprint and sourcing decisions on landed cost, with tariffs counted in.
Questions we hear about this.
- Why not a large firm's supply chain practice?
- Because the plan we leave gives an owner and a treatment to each exposure that can stop a shipment and names a second address for production, and the top exposures are treated by day 90.
- Does resilience mean more inventory?
- Often less in total. Stock moves to the points that could stop a shipment and comes out of places where it was protecting nothing.
Tell us where a single break would hurt.
Describe the suppliers, sites or lanes you worry about and the last disruption you lived through. In 15 minutes we'll say how we would map the exposure, and whether treating it is a few weeks' work or a programme.
Nothing to prepare. If sharing material would help after the call, we sign an NDA first.
The senior person who would do the work gives you a straight answer. Our people →